Essays, Analyses and Meditations


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The Spiderweb

  • I had been searching for the topology of spacetime under the assumption that spacetime is discrete (and not a continuum). While traveling in Africa, where buses tend to be in terrible conditions and an intact windshield is a rarity, it occurred to me that a cracked windshield invariably displays the same pattern that a spider uses to create its web. What do a cracked windshield and a spiderweb have in common?
  • I am still trying to articulate the answer, but i realized that the spiderweb was the topology that i was looking for, and a rather simple one (concentric circles intersected by straight lines at different angles). The spacetime of each observer is a spiderweb.
  • The spiderweb also works well as a metaphor for what the observer is doing: trying to capture the horizon of other observers.